As a key part of our business model we take a full 20% of the gross operating profit from each farm and place it into a bonus pool. This pool is used to provide vastly improved living conditions for our workers and their families. Basics that we take for granted like electricity, running water, flushing toilets and gas stoves.

We provide increased salaries and performance related bonuses as well as Social Security, which provides medical, pension and dental benefits that very few coffee farm workers receive.

We provide areas for them to plant and grow their own vegetables and help those young kids who want to, to attend school.

We don’t want to push pour Western way of life on them because we think it is somehow “better” but we want to make sure they have every opportunity available to them.

The Earth’s population is getting bigger by the second and the amount of arable land is decreasing. We have a responsibility to ourselves and future generations to leave the planet in a better state than we found it.

We take it very seriously and here in Panama we are not alone.

Environmental Impact Studies are common place and must be conducted before any type of construction takes place.

We built our own on-site, state of the art coffee processing plant and imported top of the range coffee processing machinery from Pinhalense in Brazil to ensure that the processing of the coffee causes no ill effects to the surrounding area.

This means limiting, monitoring and collecting all the water used in the process. As well as all of the by-products like the meat from the cherries and skin off the pergamino. On our farms…nothing goes to waste. Even recycling wood from the old trees to power the furnace to dry the coffee. We operate a fully closed loop system.

We have our own in-house agronomist, Jose Saracin, who is on the farms on a daily basis, and our own in-house biologist, Valentina Pedrotti. They make sure that the soil receives all the correct nutrients, that the trees are fed and treated with safe, eco-friendly fertilizers and fungicides.

We imported Californian Red worms to turn the discarded cherry meat into organic matter which we return to the plantation to provide food for the trees and restore the natural balance to the soil.

Obviously we need to be Economically Sustainable because if the farms don’t make money, we don’t make money and we cannot implement any of the practices discussed above.

This often means working smarter not harder. Using modern farming practices and machinery such as motorized pumps that cut the manpower by two thirds.

We already mentioned the new state of the art processing equipment so we can control the whole coffee process from seed to bean and produce high demand, Single-Origin Specialty Coffee. This saves on out sourcing the milling process and increases the value of the coffee by providing traceability.

This is one of the main strategies we use to maximize the value we get for every bean on our farms.

Instead of the easy approach of mixing and bagging all of your coffee into one big batch for one price, we divide, process and sell our coffee in micro lots. Not all of the coffee on each farm is equal. Different amounts of shade, different soil and different altitude even within individual farms all produce different coffee with different flavors and characters.

We will also process our coffee in different ways like honeyed, washed and natural as well as producing blends.

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